


Love in Whatever Way

by FrostbitePanda



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Angst, Dark, F/M, Fluffy?, I know I am slow on the uptake, Kidnapping, Lots of our favorite road warriors dealing with things they really rather not, Multiple Point of Views, Rescue Missions, Soulmark AU, Soulmarks, Violence, but fuck it, but in a terrible sort of way, character exploration, late to the party if you will, lots of feels, maybe confusing?, some stream of consciousness, whatever
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-07-19 08:19:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7353205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrostbitePanda/pseuds/FrostbitePanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She listens to the groaning of the stone against the winds. They should get somewhere more interior, more secure, but they don't. Sand piles up slowly in the folds of his jacket-- the wasteland become man. It fits him far too well.</p>
<p>“Never stopped hurtin’,” He says finally, voice cracked and pitted with days of neglect. He rubs the inside of his left forearm reflexively, as if the motion were a well-worn tick by now. Suddenly she has to see it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love in Whatever Way

The man with the half nose and the milky eye bends at the waist to better see him.

Max stares back, swallowing down his icy fear-- he hopes that it may grow into a banked pyre of rage that could burn him out of here and back to her. After a long examination, the man smiles crookedly at him. “I always wondered why the Bag of Nails, lost her arm,” he says to him conversationally.

His stomach drops through his body like a stone at the gleam in the bandit’s eye when he says these words. There is no other reason why the man would be bring up the subject of her arm. Max knows that his captor can see the sheen of cold sweat glossing his skin like fresh paint.

The half-nose scoffs and waves a hand girlishly. “I heard this one rumor-- and there were hundreds to be sure-- that Immortan had it off because of a _soulmark_.” The man titters, endlessly amused. “Can you believe that?”

Max attempts with every last shred of strength left to him to keep his breath even and his eyes steady. He wants to taste this man’s blood, to tear his Adam’s apple right out of his fucking neck and shove it back in through his sneering mouth.

Half-nose grins again, amused with himself, and dabs at his eyes with a fingertip. “But, I am nothing if not thorough…” He shrugs a shoulder in a defeated sort of way, as if saying _‘you understand'_. Max hears teeth creaking under the immense pressure of his jaws as he feels his captor lightly push up the hem of his left sleeve.

There’s an unbearable silence before Half-nose sighs, a man with no other options left to him. “Ah, pity,” he says, clicking his tongue and shaking his head as if grieving the untimely loss of a family pet. He stands and brushes his hands over his rotted waistcoat. “Such a rare thing in this world now. Seems almost wasteful.”

Max wants to kill, to destroy, to throw himself against the stone until his bones splinter and rot away and he can no longer feel this terrible swirl of dread that was threatening to spin him from the earth. The blank roar of fury almost blots out the man’s next words. “At least you’ll know when we kill her. I do hate giving bad news.”

+++

She remembers yellow, dusty light, her body leaned against the warm glass of her new home-- a pretty little prison. She remembers that her knees had been scraped red and raw, and her hair was still long and brown like wheat then. She remembers a slow, pricking sort of heat on her arm. She remembers that she would have ignored it, if it weren’t for the fact that she hadn’t felt anything for days.

She had tried to keep it secret-- her own, precious talisman. She did not know much about soulmarks-- but she knew they had power. That they were a brand of fate. She had simply known, back then, that the mark meant she was fated to return home and a girl with coal-black hair would greet her with a cup of cool water.

Her person couldn’t be anywhere else.

She had kept the word folded up to her chest at night, as if it could warm her to the point of combustion, curling her into a scrap of ash that could fly her back home.

By some sheer fucking luck, she had kept it secret for days and days.

It had cost her an arm for her trouble.

+++

His words had come early. Too early, according to his peers at school. Back when soulmarks were a common fixture of growing up. Back when there was so very much to be taken for granted.

It had actually been a sentence, not a word-- written in neat, curly script just under his hip. According to the Zodiac-like book he had checked out of the library (very secretly of course) words appearing near the hip were the sign of a healthy sexual compatibility.

He didn’t care to look up any of the other theories about placements or handwriting or anything else. He wouldn’t have to worry about it.

+++

She remembered-- the first time in thousands of days-- as her knees shook and her breath burned like black tar in her lungs. She was rising on a platform to her new home, no longer a pretty prison.

One word. An essential, fundamental word, scrawled in shaky hand on the inside of her missing forearm. She remembered it as she rang with borrowed blood and watched the water roar down on the Wretched.

_Water._

+++

He can barely remember Jessie’s words. They had been scoured away from his skin and his mind alike by firestorm and sandblast. The scar, webbed by many others now, still sat on his hip like the remains desert blight.

When a second set of words had appeared, it had almost been inconsequential. He wasn’t a human anymore after all-- with a soul that could be bonded to another.

It had only been one word-- a strange, war-like pronouncement that fitted the wasteland much too well. It frothed into his skin like simmering magma and burned for days afterward. The letters were stilted and jagged, slashed with a blade.

Sometimes, when the nightmares ran real hot and the desert sand froze with moonlight, he rucked up the sleeve on his left arm. Sometimes he would stare, wondering what kind of person it could be, to have the misfortune of having their word etched into his flesh. Other times he picked up a fistful of grit and scrubbed his skin raw and bloody.

+++

“It's your mark,” Vyrie says to her as she hands her a tiny stone crock. It was filled with a soothing balm to relieve aches and pains. Furiosa had asked for it with no further explanation other than her left arm hurting.

Furiosa stiffens and looks at her curiously, suspicious. “I don't have a mark.”

Vyrie nods, “Aye, but you did.”

“How do you know that?”

She shrugs, “Just a feelin’.”

Furiosa shakes her head, unconvinced. “I don't even have the arm.”

“You get phantom itches,” Vyrie answers matter of factly, not a question in the least.

She is stopped short by that. She was often plagued by the ghost of her lost limb, her nerves firing in confusion during night terrors or worse. This, though, this was a different type of pain to be sure-- a slow, bone-deep hurt that felt like poison in the marrow.

She leans against Vyrie’s desk, looks at the crock in her left hand. “What does it mean?” She asks quietly. She knows that the lore behind soulmarks was long and often ancient-- a vestige of an old world-- a world she did not belong to. She knew that if anyone still possessed this knowledge, it would be the old Vuvalini healer.

The old woman leans toward her on her seat and rests a hand on her arm. “He misses you. Quite terribly, it would seem.”

Furiosa clenches her fist, suddenly foaming with anger. Then why did he leave?

+++

He hadn’t really thought about it, hadn't given the word more than a cursory glance in days and days. Until she had asked for his name with a gun pointed in her face and had given him that fucking _killswitch_.

+++

“Do you remember him?”

The Dag looks sharply at her sister, almost an admonishment. “Well, of course. You speak of the Mad Man, right Cheedo?”

“His name was Max,” Cheedo replies, sullen.

Toast snorts and tosses the gun she had been cleaning back into the satchel at her feet. Dag gives her a sharp look as well. “You know you really shouldn’t do that. Furiosa says tossing a gun like that isn’t good for it.”

Toast rolls her eyes before turning them on Cheedo. “What about Max, Cheedo?”

Cheedo pauses in her scribbling. “Well-- Dag told me she saw… Well she saw a soulmark on his arm.”

“It wasn’t scarred up either,” Dag chimes, tying off the braid she had been plaiting into Cheedo’s hair.

Capable, shoots her head up these words, having been immersed in whatever new tome she had hauled up from Joe’s secret library. “You never told me that!”

Dag blinks at her before shrugging, unaffected.

“Yeah?” Toast barks from her spot at the workbench, a slight sneer curling her mouth, “What of it?”

Cheedo shifts, uncomfortable under the heat of the gaze of all of her sisters. “What if it was Furiosa’s?”

There was a cumbersome silence to meet this question. Toast was the first to break it. “Only makes him more of schlanger for leaving.”

“Toast!” Capable cries, pleading.

The woman snorted, shrugging a shoulder with her arms crossed, knuckles white over her biceps. “What? You know how I feel. No matter what he did, doesn’t matter ‘cause he fucking left us.”

“That’s enough,” Capable says again, more sternly, glancing at her other two sisters. Cheedo was looking near to tears while Dag petted her black crown, somehow seeming paler than usual.

Toast huffs, shakes her head in defeat, and heads out of the room.

“She’s got a point you know,” Dag says softly after a moment.

Capable straightens up in her chair, shoulders tight and lips pressed firmly together. “Toast is being a silly brat. She wanted Max to be her _dad_ or something ridiculous.”

“Maybe, but no matter what Toast thinks, we didn’t need him as much as Furiosa did. And if that was her mark…” She trails off mistily, kissing Cheedo’s head before starting back on her work of braiding.

“What was the word, Dag?” Capable ventures, voice stony.

“‘Killswitches,’” Cheedo replies instead, her eyes wet and her voice small.

+++

“I saw it, boy.”

It had been the wild-haired Vuvalini perched in the back who had said it. The one who had called out Furiosa’s ailments with no remedies. The one who had held the needle in his left arm.

+++

She gets the message three days after he and his crew are due to return home.

Anger pulses through her like the seismic snap of a caught fault line. She is the white curls of steam lifting from the over-heated coils of a supercharger, the heat of rotted rubber against dust, the horn-blast of a War Rig-- battle cry and death knell at once.

Blood lust consumes her like a hungry adder-- swallowed whole by gaping jaws. Her whole body twangs in the aftermath like a tow rope. Slowly, slowly, she lifts her head, nails biting in her flesh palm. “We leave tonight.”

+++

He comes back, two hundred and fourty-seven days later. He rides in on the heels of a storm behind the wheel of a limping beast of a V8.

She musters a party to come gather him and the car, because it looks like from here that the vehicle won’t make it. She does not go out with them.

Later in her room, after she had drank in the angles of his face like a healing potion, after she had assured him that the car would indeed be fine, they look at each other properly. The light takes on the oxidized hue of desert storm and it shivers over his skin like rushing water.

She listens to the groaning of the stone against the winds. They should get somewhere more interior, more secure, but they don't. Sand piles up slowly in the folds of his jacket-- the wasteland become man. It fits him far too well.

“Never stopped hurtin’,” He says finally, voice cracked and pitted with days of neglect. He rubs the inside of his left forearm reflexively, as if the motion were a well-worn tick by now. Suddenly she has to see it.

She walks forward and rucks his sleeve up, ignores his flinch. She pushes a thumb on the powdery moon of scar tissue just below the crease of his elbow-- a punctuation mark to the declaration on his arm. She looks at it, presses a palm over the word, raised like wire under the skin and hot as an ember. She _knows_ that she had missed him, in a part of her that she tried her best to ignore. It was hard to deny, now, with the evidence hot and real under her hand. She notes that there were scratches and scrapes around it, vestiges of removal attempts. They did not look recent.

She’s too busy looking at the word--her word-- on his skin to notice his hand wrapping around the end of her stump, streaked red with the wringing of fingers trying to push the ache out. “M’ sorry.” His voice is almost lost to the howls and rattles of the storm twisting through the buttes, the storm reaching its fifth gear now.

She looks at him and his eyes are dark, a thunderhead over the horizon, and she almost wants to laugh. Is he sorry that his word cost her her arm? That his absence had caused her physical pain? For leaving in the first place?

She feels herself step closer to him and she tells herself it is to better hear him. Not to gather his heat like solar radiation.

“Had a-- a mate,” he breathes out slowly, the words heavy and black like oil. He shakes his head once, looking at her arm. “Fucked me up. Thought there wasn’t anything good left in me. Had to leave.”

She can only stand, lost and unmoored, as he continues and his thumb rubs mindless circles of comfort over the end of her arm. “Have to have some, mm… Some good left in me,” he tells her, “to be--” he stops short, fingers squeezing. The mark under her hand seems to twitch.

She knows what goes unsaid. That to be paired with her-- has to mean he still has a soul, some goodness left in him. She knows this because it is the same truth she’s come to realize about herself.

They stand in silence for a moment, the sounds of the gale outside mimicking the tumult within themselves. She slides her flesh hand over the brand at the nape of his neck, up into his shaggy hair and he does the rest, bringing her forehead to his own with a broad palm on her scalp.

+++

 

_"I won't be so loud  
If this is what you need  
I won't be so loud  
If you won't take my lead  
I know some men hurt more than me"  
_ \-- James Blake, _"Love Me Whatever Way"_


End file.
